Is it Frank Wu's purpose to compete with black people to see who has, in terms of historical discrimination, been treated worse? Absolutely not! The purpose of this book is not competitive at all. It's rooted in Wu's real experience as a person. He was picked on for being Asian. They made fun of his eyes, and they made fun of his cultural heritage, and as he grew older, he expected for it to stop, but it didn't.
Interestingly, Wu's personal experience of racism was at its worst in California. It turns out that although Bay Area culture is to be open-minded and loving and accept of all people, still, the city remains brutally set against Asian people and Asian culture. That doesn't mean that everyone is racist, of course—it just means that there are plenty of hateful people everywhere.
Therefore, Wu believes that we should not pat ourselves on the back too early. This is especially tempting because many people have been forced to work through their relationship with racism through the lens of white hatred against black people, but Wu himself is a wonderful example of how limited that perspective can be.
When we consider racism in terms of its global reality, we see that racial hatred is just thinly veiled misanthropy. The problem of racism extends far beyond the crisis between white culture and black culture: The problem is that it is hard to truly accept those who are different than oneself, but unless we put that message into the culture, Wu would argue that racism still abounds.
